Kiribati buys land in Fiji to save citizens from sea-level rise

The tiny Pacific island nation of Kiribati is in talks to buy land from Fiji where its citizens can move
to when climate-change-induced sea level rise inundates their
homes.

Kiribati's president, Anote Tong, has
said that he's begun talks with the military government of Fiji to
buy 20 square kilometres of land on which the population of the the
32 coral atolls that comprise Kiribati can relocate to as their
land disappears under the waves.

"This is the last resort, there's no way out of this one," Tong
told Fijian TV. "Our people will have to move as the tides have
reached our homes and villages."

Fiji has understandably raised concerns over the entire
113,000-strong population of Kiribati landing on its shores in one
go, so Tong says he plans to first send over a trickle of skilled
workers. "They need to find employment," he said. "Not as
refugees but as immigrant people with skills to offer, people who
have a place in the community, people who will not be seen as
second-class citizens." To that end, Tong has also launched an
"Education for Migration" programme, aimed at increasing the
employability of the population of Kiribati.

You might be thinking that moving from Kiribati to Fiji is
like jumping from the frying pan into the fire, but the geographies
of the two island chains couldn't be more different. While Kiribati
is a series of utterly flat coral atolls spread across the equator,
with the vast majority of the land less than two metres above sea
level, Fiji consists of an archipelago of 106 inhabited volcanic
islands with peaks rising more than 1,300 metres into the sky. For
the time being, the Fijians should be safe from the ravages of
climate change.

Of course, the i-Kiribati have some time on their side
too. The most
recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change ( IPCC) in 2007 projected sea level rise before 2100 to be in the
region of 18 to 59 centimetres. That estimate doesn't include some
uncertainties, like climate-carbon cycle feedbacks and changes in
ice glow, but even in the worst scenarios predicted by
climatologists, severe sea level rise tends to take place on a
timescale of centuries and millennia.

An updated set of climate change predictions from the IPCC
is due
in 2014.

Comments

Hasn't anybody told the gubmint of Kiribati that the American GOP believes climate change to be a hoax?

R. K.

Mar 9th 2012

Given that the temperature for the world has in fact LOWERED not risen, and not on square inch of land has been lost on the islands, this seems rather a fools errand. Global Warming has had to be renamed Global Climate Change because of it. Yet another excuse to take people's liberty. What's next, fake alien invasions?Dig a little deeper, folks.